Staying in the moment, staying in the immediate experience of the Moment of Now, it is okay to know the names of things this is a working mind; it is normal to be aware of and know the purpose of objects, it is normal not to be a moron who does not understand what he is looking at. Socially active people should not practice at this level: in order not to know the names of objects, to look at them and not to know their purpose. It is already a very deep disconnection of the entire mental plane and, as a rule, it is practiced in some retreats by hermits, but not by socially active people. You all have been in such states when, after some long flight, you woke up somewhere in an unfamiliar place and could not understand who are you, where are you, what is hanging on the wall and, what does it all mean after all? After such long flights, changing time zones, sometimes it takes time for the mind to turn on and download files for the normal movement of thinking to begin. Otherwise, you simply have perception, you open your eyes, but the mind does not turn on, it is still in some kind of dormant state. Sometimes this happens during sudden awakenings, when you wake up in the wrong phase and, again, it takes time to align the mental plane and your perception.
So, I told you about the four parts of our mental plane, and also pointed out that staying in the Moment of Now turns off, in fact, three of the four parts and leaves only one at work. It has nothing to do with time, first of all it is connected with turning off the imagination. You turn off the imaginary, those thoughts that produce stories, that unfold a certain time continuum, and you come to the Moment of Now in which this psychosomatic organism is functioning. Now there is quite a lot of speculation that thoughts are also occurring in the Moment of Now, but these are some kind of advanced people that confuse you a little. Of course, thoughts also occur in the Moment of Now, but our imaginarium is able to unfold its space-time continuum, and when attention begins to swim along this continuum, asking questions: What is going to happen? What has happened? What happened when I was a kid? Where is it now? it is what is called the exit from the Moment of Now which is right here and now. Thus, you lose touch with direct experience, and attention is immersed in these stories. So, the Moment of Now, about which Ram Dass once spoke, he called it be here now, and as Eckhart Tolle now says this is not a profanation. It is practice, the practice of staying in direct experience. It allows you to see how much trouble and suffering your imagination is giving you, and this practice is the cornerstone of all teachings. I have not come across a single teaching that would not give you support for the Moment of Now, which would not talk about disconnecting, stopping internal dialogues, about stopping this imaginary. But you should not stop the working mind, which adequately tells you the names of objects and their purpose. This is superfluous, this mind does not serve the ego structure, the ego structure is served by the imagination, thinking, etc.
Now I have told you in detail about the mental plane, as we see it in our Free Away teaching, have told you about the practice of the Moment of Now, that is the withdrawal of attention and the best of all is the withdrawal of attention in which you are aware of your body. You can concentrate on breathing, you can concentrate on sensations, you can concentrate on perception, but at the same time, you do not lose the perception of your own body. Because your body is always in the Moment of Now, it is never yesterday, it is never tomorrow. This organism is always fresh, always today, and, as I like to joke, even with your own breakfast: you have this fast break not tomorrow, not yesterday, but right here and now.
This is where I want to end this chapter. Send your questions to the address at the end of the book, and Ill be waiting for you on our live streams every two weeks.
2. Four kinds of experience. Mystical and spiritual experience
After writing the first chapter of this series, I was very pleasantly surprised by the great attention and received quite a lot of mail with questions about this. Therefore, literally in hot pursuit, I decided to continue and I understood that I had touched on a very important topic the topic of thinking and the topic of the gradation of this thinking.
People ask me about a working and parasitic mind or a thinking mind, but this is the terminology of Ramesh Balsekar working mind and thinking mind. I think that in our system it will be precisely the working mind and imagination, respectively, we conditionally divided the mind into 4 parts. I believe that this is the best option for you to be aware of what entering into the Moment of Now means and what is ultimately being cut off there. It is that thinking that is able to unfold the space-time continuum and switch attention from the current immediate experience into a fantasy about this experience, and the distinction of these things is very, very important.
What questions will we discuss next? I would like to raise an issue that is very closely related to the types of thinking this is the issue of the types of experience. Today I will give you such a concept as four types of experience, and you will add a little bit to the picture. What do the four experiences mean? Yesterday we dwelt in some detail on the mediated experience that we receive through our mental plane that is, it is the ability to receive experience through the imagination. We are told some kind of plot, we receive information, we build all this into a kind of a picture in our imagination, we put an image of ourselves there and just through this we get an indirect experience.
This experience is very important, and we can call it the experience of the mind, but more important is the direct experience. This is an experience gained in the Moment of Now through our senses. It is then remembered, it is then recorded, but it should never be confused with the experience gained indirectly. You must clearly distinguish this experience I got directly, for example I learned to ride a bike, and this one I read about how to ride a bike. You can read a book about a world swimming champion, but that does not mean that you have learned to swim, that is, learning to swim directly, getting direct experience and reading about it, hearing about it these are different things. In your system of thinking, there should be different folders in your memory, which do not allow you to lie that this is I received directly, and this I received indirectly. The differentiation and distinction between direct and indirect experience is a very important point.
The fact is that when we touch mysticism, spirituality (and now we have a very large access to literature), we, of course, have a great temptation to simulate all this and wake up just in our imagination. However, any difficult situation pisses us off and sends us straight to who we really are and what we think of ourselves. Therefore, it is very important not to confuse mediated experience with direct one. It is such a childhood illness to present fantasies as reality and do not have the ability or strength to admit that this is only my mediated experience, that I dont have it in my direct experience.
These are the two types of experience. The next type of experience that I am going to give you is an experience of altered states of consciousness. In our Formation, we do not consider this type of experience at all, because we have a very clear attitude to spiritual experiences. Experiments obtained with the help of all kinds of means, no matter what permitted or prohibited, changing our everyday state of consciousness are not spiritual. They are psychedelic experiences involving changes in brain chemistry. That is, if you accept something or influence in some way the body these are altered states of consciousness, and they are not a spiritual experience. I want you to understand this clearly.